March 24, 2017
After I awakened to the possibility that my time in San Francisco could be a life changing experience for the better, I quickly realized a few other things. First of all, no one knew me in San Francisco. This meant that nobody had expectations regarding who I was supposed to be, what I was supposed to do, or even what I was supposed to look like. Second, San Francisco is a city where anything goes. I mean, there was a guy at my noon AA meeting whose whole face was tattooed with a big, scary spider web. Another girl wore a pink tutu and knee-high striped socks every day and had bright pink hair sprinkled with glitter. If people could get away with whole face tattoos and wearing ballerina outfits all day, then nothing was stopping me from getting a bit creative while I was figuring out who I wanted to be.
One of the advantages of being in a new city where people let their freak flags fly freely was that I suddenly realized that I did not have to look any certain way. Specifically, I did not have to worry about being pretty anymore. And I had never felt a freedom like the freedom that came from giving a flying fuck about being physically attractive. I had been obsessed with my appearance since I was a teenager and I was ruthlessly critical of my body and face, always coming up short. Furthermore, I had always believed in this sick notion that my mediocre looks were an affront to the men around me. In my mind, if I did not constantly try to lose weight or look better, I wasn’t keeping up my end of the bargain when it came to the silent social contract between men and women. You know, that contract where women secretly agree to be beautiful and thin and perfect at all times and men agree to approve of them.
So, one of the first orders of business was to fuck all of that. I decided it was time for a change. I was no longer going to cater to the perceived expectations of men or buy off on society’s expectations of women. I made an appointment with a salon up the street. “You want it ALL off?” the hairdresser asked me wide-eyed as I sat in his chair and as he held up my shoulder-length blonde hair. “Uhhh…okay, maybe leave an inch?” I said slightly changing my mind from the shaved head I had originally requested. “Hair is fun. An inch to an inch and a half will be good for you,” the stylist assured me. “Good call. Yes, an inch and a half it is.” I decided enthusiastically.
After I cut off all of my oppressive hair, I went straight home and solicited the help of a few of my roommates. “You want it like, white? Like platinum, white blonde?” my roommate Becky asked me. “Yes! I want it platinum blonde, but then the best part will be when my dark roots start to grow in and it will look even cooler with the contrast between the platinum and the dirty blonde!” I said excitedly. “Girl, you ain’t never getting laid again. This shit’s going to look terrible,” Becky said shaking her head. “Plus, you’re going to bleach the shit out of your hair and ruin it,” she continued, trying to talk me out of it. “Well, it’s a good thing that I have zero interest in getting laid and that hair grows back,” I said smiling. I had already bought three boxes of at-home hair bleaching kits and, although Becky was a force to be reckoned with, nothing was going to change my mind. My new hair was fun and I liked it.
Next I felt compelled to change my wardrobe. I came to San Francisco with a bunch of “really cool” outdoorsy clothes – you know clothes from those obscure and pretentious outdoorsy brands, like Arc’teryx, that make you look even cooler than if you’re wearing some pedestrian outdoorsy brand like Columbia. I had these fancy lightweight rock climbing pants that zipped off at the knees and turned into shorts for warmer weather. I had solid color long sleeve tops and a variety of Life is Good brand t-shirts. Everything was hideous. Worse than that, all of my clothes were a testament to what a sheep I had been when I was at Colorado College surrounded by a bunch of people who wanted to take up residence in nature’s butthole.
I wasn’t a rock climber. Tried it once, hated it. Life wasn’t good! Life was a bit of shit show at the moment. And what could be more boring than solid color long sleeve shirts that doubled as long winter underwear. Sure, I fit in at Colorado College and, in sporting this wardrobe, the students were tricked into recognizing me as part of their high-end outdoorsy tribe. But, none of this was really me. So, I kept my down jacket and other practical items and gave everything else I owned to the women in the house. I replaced all my clothes with items I found at the Goodwill and other second-hand stores that were just up the street. I bought things that I actually liked, rather than things I thought would help me gain entry into elitist social circles.
One thing I particularly liked about our local Goodwill was their men’s pants selection. After about a month in San Francisco, I came to realize that women’s pants were for the birds. Women’s pants cling to your legs and, for some reason, while men can enjoy the comfort of a wide pant leg, women are supposed to have pants that show the contours of their bodies. What a fucking rigged system. Screw that, I thought. Men’s pants only from now on.
The next part of my do-over was to stop obsessing about my weight. This looked like my happily gaining about 40 lbs. My weight gain was, in part, due to extenuating circumstances. There was a fantastic donut shop less than a block from the house. It constantly emitted wonderful smells and tempted me left, right, and sideways all day long. I had not eaten a donut in years. When I was in high school and college I was convinced I was grossly unattractive and part of that was my weight. I put myself on draconian starvation diets and obsessively counted calories throughout the day. This was not a way to live.
I decided that from now on, I was allowed to eat donuts, and as many as I wanted. And if I had to buy bigger jeans because of eating said delicious donuts, well who really cares? I didn’t mind a bigger version of me. The only reason I would mind a bigger me would be if I were trying to make myself appealing to others (god knows I didn’t have enough self-esteem to care much about my health at that point). Fuck constantly worrying about being appealing to others. That was exhausting, futile, and, ultimately, incredibly counterproductive to my mission to be myself. Plus, men’s jeans were only like three dollars at the Goodwill. A new pair of pants wouldn’t break the budget.
In addition to transforming my appearance into something I found incredibly fun, liberating, and awesome, I needed to change my some things on the inside. Part of this step involved radically revising the expectations I set for myself in terms of what I was “should” be doing with my life. Clearly, I had a hard time managing my life before rehab – so what I was doing wasn’t working. I realized that this was not the time to be devoting my emotional and intellectual reserves to academic pursuits like writing a thesis or deciding whether third wave feminism undermined the fruits of second wave feminism. I no longer wanted to be Julie the good student. Plus, frankly, I could have given a shit about feminist theory when I was in San Francisco. I was on a quest to save my life and being devoted to feminism and trying to figure out what that even meant was a luxury I couldn’t afford at the time.
Additionally, I intentionally chose not to talk about my tennis accomplishments and I opted not to seek out opportunities to play tennis in my free time, as I had done my whole life. I no longer wanted to be just Julie the tennis player. Instead, I did what I could handle and what I wanted to do for once. I took a fairly mindless job at the local YMCA that allowed me to concentrate on personal growth rather than devoting all my energy to academics or sports. I was the “weekday morning opener” for the Richmond District branch of the Presidio YMCA. And my job title was a fancy way of saying that I opened up the YMCA at 5:30 am Monday through Friday and handed out towels to members for eight hours a day. I freckin’ loved it.
Maybe handing out towels wasn’t as glamorous as being a student who was attending a fancy college and trying to solve the world’s problems, but I actually had the opportunity to impact people’s lives rather than just talk about impacting people’s lives. I dealt with hundreds of people from all walks of life, each for only a few brief moments a day. And, in this time, I could be someone who contributed good things to others’ lives or someone who made others feel unhappy. On a daily basis, I did my best to choose the former.
Plus, my job was endlessly entertaining. For one, it exposed me to all types of people. My particular YMCA ran a lot of community programs, including two days a week where we held a food and bread bank for the local communities. Because of these programs we attracted a lot more than people who were just trying to get some exercise. Additionally, we were right in the middle of the local Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean communities and the diversity of our local neighborhood exposed me to all types of cultures.
Every Wednesday, I had to fight off an angry mob of Russians, who were waiting for the food bank to open at 9 am, just to get in the front door of the facility. Thursdays involved my running interference between the Russians and the Asians at the bread bank and, on one occasion, I even received a death threat from an elderly Asian woman who was pissed because I had to escort her out of the facility for punching another elderly woman in the face over a can of soup. Fridays were equally exciting. Every Friday the kids from the special-ed camp one building over came to our gym to play basketball. A few of the kids fancied themselves little kleptomaniacs and I had to keep an extra close eye on our drink cooler or else they’d swipe an Odwalla juice and scurry out of sight.
But, while radically changing my appearance and what I did with my time were tremendously eye opening for me, perhaps the most important lesson I learned in San Francisco was that people, at the end of the day, are good. I came to believe that most all of us share a similar heart and desire similar things out of life. My roommates taught me this. All of us in the house had similar goals to be better people and to learn to exist in our own skin. Yes, my roommates had certain criminal pasts to which I could not entirely relate, but I had countless advantages throughout my entire life that they did not. Our commonalities far outweighed our differences. We all wanted to be accepted and understood. We all needed friendship and loved ones in our life. We all wanted to do the best we could. And we all wanted to get better.
I found out that most my roommates were warriors. They had endured things in their pasts that were far more excruciating than I could even imagine. Plus, I realized that most of them were fascinating and truly brilliant people. There was my roommate Heather for example. She grew up the daughter of a NASA rocket scientist who had a bit of an alcohol and anger problem. As a result, Heather struggled with self-worth from the time she was an infant. Somehow, both Heather and her brother landed in prison for being rather big time drug dealers in Contra Costa County. Heather’s drug dealing escapades were particularly impressive. In her glory days, Heather owned four houses with four meth cooking operations and employed a minimum of three body doubles at all times. When the cops finally apprehended her, it was only after she led them on a wild goose chase for over five years. Heather’s brother was equally notorious. The law’s finally catching up with him resulted in his sharing a prison yard with Charles Manson. I couldn’t even begin wrap my brain around their lives, but I had to admit, these two truly amazed me.
Despite the fact that she initially intimidated the hell out of me, Heather and I quickly developed a ridiculous fondness for one another. We were both troublemakers at heart who liked to push the envelope and see how much we could get away with. We routinely were reprimanded and once put on restriction for laughing too hard past curfew. When we got overnight passes, we’d spend a night at her mom’s house across the bay and find places to play pool, drink diet coke, and practice having fun without any kind of mind-altering substances to boost our confidence or relieve our anxieties. And Heather was fiercely protective of me. The one and only confrontation I got into at the house was with a girl named Tony who was angry that I had not taken my clothes out of the dryer fast enough. Heather quickly shut that exchange down. “Tony, you realize that if you mess with her, you mess with me. And, I think you learned in jail that you don’t want to mess with me.” It was clear that Heather and I had a friendship like no other.
As a result of choosing to embrace my time in San Francisco, ironically, I felt freer than I had ever felt before – despite the fact that I lived in an extremely controlled and structured environment riddled with endless rules. And it was with these women who I originally feared that I felt the safest. The funny thing was that, in the end, what turned out to be the hardest part of San Francisco was not living in the house. It was the fact that I eventually had to leave. The reality is that one cannot live in a halfway house forever. After many of the original girls I started with ventured out on their own, the house became stale. I soon realized it was time for me to go, too. This was not an easy decision and I put off leaving for a long time. All in all, I lived at the house for eight and a half months – two and a half months more than I initially agreed to.
It was always expected that I would “graduate” from the halfway house and return to Colorado College to finish my degree, which would require only two more semesters of study. When the day came for me to board the plane that would take me back to Colorado, I wept uncontrollably. It hit me that this unreal and magical chapter of my life was coming to an end.
When I got back to CC, I was different. I didn’t adopt a pet cause and plaster activism stickers on my Nalgene water bottle. I didn’t even have a Nalgene water bottle anymore. Instead, I resolved to try to find genuine connections with everyone I met and to be a kind, good presence on this planet. That was my cause. And my roommates in San Francisco helped me find that. I try to advance this cause still to this day. I fail miserably sometimes, but I keep trying.
As for my amazing roommates, I kept up with many of them by letter for the first few years I was back in Colorado. Heather was my best friend back there and we made it a point to talk at least once a week by phone to check in with each other and stay close. Eventually the day came when Heather stopped answering, though. After I couldn’t get ahold of her for a few weeks, I was informed by a mutual friend back in San Francisco that Heather had met a man, gotten pregnant, and started using meth again. She had kept this from me because she didn’t want me to worry about her. It turns out that Heather’s delivery was full of complications and, ultimately, because of her meth use, she bled to death while giving birth. The news hit me hard. I loved Heather and her love for me was a big part of why I was able to thrive in San Francisco. To this day I still really miss her.
In terms of my life these days, I am nowhere near as footloose and fancy free as I allowed myself to be in San Francisco. Returning to Colorado posed a host of challenges I did not face back in the city. In San Francisco, no one knew me and I could be whoever and whatever I wanted. Back in Colorado, there were expectations and, initially, I crumbled under the pressure. I still have not gotten back to the absolute freedom I felt in that big city but, make no mistake, I am working on it.
And I’ve come to accept that that is my life – it’s just a big, perpetual work in progress. San Francisco was just the beginning of my journey to live authentically and feel comfortable in my skin. I have kept San Francisco and all of my roommates close to my heart over the last fifteen years and I still regard the experience as the most transformative time in my life. I often think of my roommates and our impromptu dance parties or the sing alongs I would make them do with me while I played my guitar on our front porch. These memories continue to give me the strength I need to be happy with the imperfect, flawed, but wonderful mess I am today.
xdoctor_k
Thank you Jules PS I cried for Heather